Peter Adamson

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452 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2019 last heard Dec 2019

Peter Adamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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New Books in Philosophy · Peter Adamson, "Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Volume 3" (Oxford UP, 2019) · 16 Dec 2019 podcast

So uh the reason I picked the word the or the phrase actually Islam Islamic world or philosophy in the Islamic world is first of all, I didn't use Islamicate because I don't really think it's a real word.

Welcome to Academy.

I mean, uh so I can see why academics might want to use the word Islamicate when they're talking to each other, but I'm not talking to academics, at least not only academics.

So I wanted to use a word that I thought people would know what it meant.

So d the other thing is that there's this long running dispute about whether to call the subject we're talking about here Arabic philosophy or Islamic philosophy.

And there are famously arguments against both.

So the problem with Arabic philosophy Arabic f so actually one problem with Arabic philosophy is that people always think that you mean Arab philosophy.

So they don't realize that Arabic is the name of a language in that phrase.

And so you always have to explain, I don't mean Arab, I mean Arabic.

But i that's kind of a stupid reason to worry about it, because that's just a confusion on the part of the listener.

But um there's a more serious problem, which is that a fair amount of philosophy in this tradition is not in Arabic, it's in Persian or other languages, like Syriac, Hebrew.

Um so the problem and then the problem with Islamic philosophy is that it puts the religion of Islam front and center in a way that's rather misleading.

One way that it's m misleading is that a lot of the figures we're talking about here, so Avicenna would be a good example, and as I think we're going to get on to talk about later, Avicenna's the most important figure in the whole book, right?

And to calling Avicenna an Islamic philosopher isn't exactly wrong.

I mean, he was a Muslim, but I don't think it would be fair to say that Avicenna's philosophy is mostly about, for example,

Giving a philosophical account of Islam.

That's not the project.

So he is more like a Muslim who's a philosopher, right?

In a way that so actually it would make more sense to call Thomas Aquinas to mention him again.

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